The Forest Queen

by Betsy Cornwell

  As always, Bird seemed to read my mind. “I’ll take my lass for a hunt,” he said. “We need to do our part to keep meat on the table, too.”

  “What table?” I said, smiling. “And what do you mean? If it weren’t for your cooking, Little Jane and I would have eaten our boar raw, or burned to ashes, as well you know.” And if it weren’t for you, we would neither of us be living free and hunting boar in the forest at all, I thought.

  We shared another look. I knew I didn’t have to say that, either.

  Bird shook his head. “You’d have figured it out,” he said, pouring water into the kettle. “Now go and see how Little Jane is getting on with the Mae, if you like, and I’ll bring the tea out to you.”

  He was turned away from me, toward the coals of the fire. As he stoked them the red light flared across his hair, turning it briefly the color of rubies. I wanted to reach out, to run my fingers through that deep red . . .

  I left Bird and walked into the dappled green brightness outside.

  Mae Tuck and Little Jane were by the stream, my tall friend sitting with her bare feet in the current. The Mae crouched next to her, skirts girded, lifting water from the stream in her cupped hands and pouring it slowly over Little Jane’s calves. Little Jane’s eyes were closed, and her face was relaxed.

  “Ladies,” I said in greeting, “how are you getting on?”

  Little Jane opened her eyes, blinking a few times. “I don’t know how I managed without the Mae, even before I was with child,” she said, sighing and leaning back farther on her elbows. “I’ve never felt so cared for in my life.”

  Mae Tuck shook her head, beginning to gently massage the muscles in Little Jane’s legs. “Everyone needs caring for,” she said.

  Jane’s saying she had never been looked after struck my heart, but something else she’d said moved me more.

  She had never actually said she was with child before. She’d never once used the words. And what I saw on her face wasn’t just relaxation, I realized: it was acceptance.

  “I want you to know,” I told Mae Tuck, “first of all that you are welcome here, with us, for as long as you want to stay. But if there’s any way that we can help you get back to your home, anything that I can do as the daughter of Loughsley to restore your good standing—​I’ll do it. We’ll help you however we can, I promise.”

  Mae Tuck kept her eyes on her patient. “Is that better?” she asked.

  My friend sighed in satisfaction. “Oh yes. All the swelling’s gone, I think.” She pulled her feet out of the stream and wiped them on the hem of her dress.

  “We’ll do that every morning, so, and there will be compresses for you when the stream freezes over,” the Mae said. “And we’ll get some fish for you to eat. Salmon, if we can.”

  She then turned to me. “Thank you, my child,” she said. “Thank you for what you did last night, for my own sake and for the sake of this young mother here. The village of Woodshire is small, as you know, and it has only gotten smaller in my time. Little Jane is the patient I have most worried about, ever since she came to me four months ago. The other women who are with child now all have had children before, and—​well, families who are minding them. I am very grateful to you for bringing us together again.”

  She arched her shoulders and raised her arms above her head, stretching. “I’ve been waiting for a sign from above, from the Lady, to tell me it’s time to move on from Woodshire’s parsonage. I didn’t think it would come so soon, especially once I was jailed; I thought she was telling me to do my work there, and certainly there was plenty of healing to be done. But I know now that she was bringing me to you.” She took my hand. Her own was still wet and cool from the stream. “Yes, I will stay here with you, at least until Little Jane has birthed her baby. Then we will see what the Lady says. The Mae are a mendicant order, you know.”

  I smiled at her reference to the Lady; it was antiquated now, almost quaint. The Brethren taught that the Lord was God, and I’d only learned about his Lady—​always “his”—​in some of the stories I’d heard at church, or from my nurses or tutors. But even in those stories she’d never been powerful enough to send visions or signs.

  “I thought that most Sistren were cloistered,” I said, remembering something else from those stories. “Aren’t Mae a kind of Sistren?” I’d had a Sistren governess once, a cold and strict woman who had always made it clear that she longed to return to her nunnery, and not have to teach theology to loud and sticky children.

  Mae Tuck, sitting by the stream and smiling as she massaged Little Jane’s swollen feet and spoke of the Lady’s signs, could not have been more different from that severe Sister.

  “The Mae are one of many Sistren orders. Most Sistren are cloistered, these days,” Mae Tuck acknowledged, “and many more than used to be—​but that’s a story for another day. The Mae are simply traveling midwives, really. We go where the Lady tells us we are needed.” She looked up at the canopy, her dun-colored eyes still twinkling, and then she looked behind me. Her smile grew. “Yes, I think that for now to stay with you is exactly what I should do, my child.”

  I looked behind me to see what she was smiling about. Bird was approaching us, a steaming mug in each hand. “Sugar in it and everything, though we’ve no milk,” he said. “For you, Mae Tuck.” He gave her one mug with a respectful nod.

  He brought the other mug to Little Jane, and handed it to her with a gentleness that filled my heart with affection for them both. I trotted back to the cave to pour tea for me and for Bird into two horn cups I’d brought along with the Loughsley supplies the night before. I took no sugar myself, but I added four cubes to Bird’s tea.

  At his first sip he raised his eyebrows.

  “I remember you always liked it sweet, when we were little,” I said. “Your mother used to tease you.”

  “She said I needed something to keep me sweet,” he recalled. “When I got old enough to realize she couldn’t always buy me sugar, I trained myself out of liking it. I’ve drunk it black for years.” He looked up, his cheeks flushing. “But this is good, Silvie. I’d just made myself forget how much I like sweet tea, that’s all.”

  “I would have given you sugar, Bird,” I said.

  He shook his head and took another long sip. “We’ll spare it for the winter now,” he said. “We need all the food to last as long as possible. I’m glad I’ve trained myself out of it, really. But that makes this even more of a treat.”

  “A treat indeed,” said Mae Tuck. “I must teach you how to make bramble wine out here, in exchange. I’ll toast us with this, if you don’t mind, Silviana.”

  Her deference to me was unsettling, even more so than Little Jane’s had been. I was no leader. “Of course,” I said.

  She raised her mug, and the three of us followed suit, Little Jane coming to stand on the Mae’s right-hand side so that we formed a kind of circle.

  “To three brave young people who know their own hearts,” she said. “May you always have the courage of your convictions.”

  As we drank I heard a familiar flutter. Bird’s falcon landed in front of the cave, a fair-sized salmon clutched in her beak. And even though Mae Tuck hadn’t said a prayer, or mentioned the Lord or the Lady at all in her toast, it still had the ring about it of a blessing.

  EIGHT

  Scarlet and Much

  That night, Bird slept alone by the mouth of the cave. He said nothing about it, but as he walked past me while we all were bedding down he briefly touched my shoulder. When I looked up I saw something in his eyes that might have been apology, or sadness, or longing. I wanted it to be the latter, and I didn’t; but without Bird next to me, even at the end of that long night, I found I couldn’t sleep.

  Mae Tuck seemed to have settled down in her new surroundings with total ease: she snored soundly. Little Jane and Bird slept like stones.

  After endless hours of lying in wait for sleep that wouldn’t come, I rose and walked to the hot spring at the back of the c
ave. I slipped off the trousers and men’s shirt I still wore: laundry in the forest was an ordeal involving frigid river water, the labor of wringing out heavy, sopping fabric, and drying for days on end over the fire. We wore the same clothes until they were truly dirty, something that seemed normal to Bird and Little Jane but had offended all the aristocratic sensibility I had left. I’d never worn the same dress two days in a row in all my life, at Loughsley Abbey; I’d only even dressed myself there because I preferred my privacy to the assistance of a lady’s maid.

  Well, I had privacy now, in this place I shared with three deeply sleeping friends, and I felt no shyness at all as I removed the rest of my clothing and stepped in. The warm water felt heavy and rich on my bare skin, much like the fine gowns I’d left behind. In the dim red light of Bird’s banked fire, the ripples on the surface gleamed like jewels.

  I sank back into the spring. Every sore muscle in my body sighed.

  My eyes fluttered closed, but my mind felt clearer and more awake than it had all day. The water was just deep enough that I could let my legs float, that I felt carried. Cradled.

  Complete darkness and warmth, privacy and safety. Alone unto myself, but with the comforting presence of those I loved nearby.

  I wondered, resting there, if Little Jane’s baby was dreaming, too.

  * * *

  I stayed in the hot spring through the beginning of dawn. Bird was the first to stir, and I was too lulled by the heat and the water to leap for my clothes as he stood up. It was still half-dark inside the cave, anyway, I told myself—​but I knew, some part of me knew, that I wouldn’t mind if it had been bright.

  He turned toward where I should have been sleeping, and I watched surprise and apprehension move through the lines of his body when he didn’t find me there. “Silvie . . .”

  “I’m here, Bird.” My voice sounded low, husky, even to my own ears, as if it had gone bathing, too.

  “Silvie—” His body told me the moment he knew where I was. He turned discreetly away. “Did you sleep well?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper. “I’ll come back to you tonight, if you want me to. But I thought—​I can make hammocks for us with the cloth from the sacks we brought back. I only thought, with the Mae here now . . .”

  “No, you were right.” I knew well that I should learn to sleep without him again. We’d be up in the trees soon, anyway . . . and while I cared less than I likely ought to about what Mae Tuck or anyone else might think of our sleeping arrangements, I had come to the woods chasing freedom. If I turned out to need Bird out here even more than I had at Loughsley, how free was I? How bound?

  I reached for my cloak. “Hammocks would be perfect, at least until we’re in the trees,” I said. I dried off and dressed again, and I resigned myself to sleeping alone.

  When Bird came back to the cave the next evening, he brought something with him. Not a rabbit or another salmon, but we hardly minded. The strips of boar drying over the fire still seemed like more than we’d eat in a month, and the previous day’s fish combined with some dandelion greens Mae Tuck and I had foraged had been a veritable feast—​and the cheese and grain at the back of the cave were like gold in a treasury.

  I felt guilty remembering my hesitation the first time I left Loughsley. If I’d gotten over my pride, my murky fear, and gone back earlier to take the food I would have freely eaten in my own house, we would never have gone hungry. And maybe Little Jane would not have gotten sick.

  “Gifts for you, Silvie, Little Jane,” Bird said, with an apologetic nod toward Mae Tuck. “There were only two of them, Mae, and I didn’t know if you’d like to . . . to hunt.” Then, looking back at us, “Their mother’s died. They need looking after, and my lass could always use helpers.” Seraph ruffled her feathers.

  He pulled two gray dust balls from the leather satchel at his side. That was what they looked like, anyway: scraggly things, little more than ill-organized piles of speckled down.

  But when he held them up and the firelight touched them, a pair of angry yellow eyes glared out of each ball. Tiny beaks opened and closed with protesting clacks. The owlets cheeped imperiously, protesting the light.

  “Oh, Bird,” Little Jane murmured, reaching out and taking one from him, cupping it against her cheek. “Oh, he’s lovely.”

  Bird handed the other owlet to me. It was so soft and light I could barely feel it in my hands, except for its thrumming heartbeat.

  “This one’s a female,” he told me as he handed her off. “They’re the better hunters, but don’t tell that small lad, or he’ll feel inferior.”

  “Inferior nothing!” Little Jane said, stroking her owlet’s downy head. He glowered around at the room in general before he submitted to the petting. After a few moments his eyes half closed in sleepy contentment.

  Mine pecked at the drawstring of my cloak. No amount of petting was softening her glare, but I rather liked her for it. And her fierce yellow eyes, reflecting the fire, held some of the deep ruby redness that Bird’s hair had the day before.

  “I’ll call her Scarlet,” I said, scratching under her beak. Scarlet seemed to like that a little better, although she still looked at me as if I had dishonored her family. I took a little scrap of meat from the bone I’d been gnawing and held it up to her.

  She snatched it so fast I hardly caught the movement. Although she still glared, there was something in her imperious manner that suggested I might be permitted to keep giving her food, if I didn’t get too cocky about it.

  “Well, mine’s a lovey,” said Little Jane. Her owlet had already fallen asleep in her hand, his head lolling a bit to the side, reduced to just a dust ball again with his huge eyes closed.

  “They don’t look like much when you can’t see their eyes,” I said.

  “Then I’ll call mine Much,” said Little Jane, “for he’s so small, and there’s so much of me—​especially lately.” She laughed. As we all laughed with her, it was Mae Tuck’s eye I caught. Could she see all the good she had already done for my friend?

  Little Jane brushed her cheek softly across the sleeping Much’s head. “We balance each other out that way,” she said.

  * * *

  It was a struggle not to spend the whole of the next day cooing over my new little charge, but the specter of winter haunted us every moment. Several times as I gathered plants and herbs with Mae Tuck and hung them for drying I stopped, trying not to shiver, certain that I could taste snow in the air.

  I’d never felt so close to the seasons before. I remembered Clara saying at the Hunt Ball that the seasons hardly came to the city at all, that she didn’t know how I could bear them out here in the wilderness . . . I’d known then that she only meant to convince herself of how superior the court was, but I hadn’t realized how wrong she was.

  Every month of every year of my life in Loughsley Abbey I was wrapped in warmth and comfort. The seasons affected only which fruits and meats were served at our table, and whether the visiting nobles would hunt or fish, or skate on the frozen river. Which colors I saw out my window.

  Out here winter wasn’t a meal, a charming pastime, a color.

  It was a threat.

  * * *

  Every night, in the cave, that threat receded. Bird’s fire would mellow to coals over the course of the day while we were building, but it never quenched. In fact, the fire hadn’t gone out since he’d kindled it on our first night in the forest . . . nearly a month before. It didn’t seem possible we’d been here so long when I looked at the rising moon through the trees; it was just a sliver past new, exactly as it had been when we arrived. My flux had come on me again, too. It had just ended when I ran away, and I hadn’t thought, and then I’d been grateful for the Mae’s advice on how to manage it out here. There was no denying the time gone by.

  “We should mark the occasion somehow,” I told Bird and Little Jane, carefully prodding the tubers I was roasting at the edge of the coals. Bird had built up the center of the fire again, and there, in the
old cauldron he’d brought here years ago, simmered a rabbit his falcon had caught, fragrant with the herbs Mae Tuck and I had picked together.

  I had never felt the cold so much in my old life, but sitting around the fire with these three, I thought I’d never felt warmth so much, either.

  Scarlet hooted indignantly in my pocket. I stroked her head, soft as a cloud, and fed her a tiny shred of the rabbit’s offal. That morning, Little Jane had fed Much a mouse that had unwisely invaded our grain stores during the night. The way the scrawny owlet gulped down the whole mouse was . . . impressive, but I found myself squeamish at the idea of feeding my charge live meat.

  Scarlet swallowed the rabbit’s stomach and chirruped. She blinked her huge, outraged eyes, then fluffed her feathers, eyeing the darkness beyond the fire at the cave’s mouth.

  I smiled at her, wondering how I could grow so fond of any creature this quickly. I was like Clara fretting over Titan! I’d never wanted a pet at Loughsley. I loved riding, but that was for its freedom; I never longed for a pony or a puppy of my own, the way some children did. I’d seen too many dogs and cats mistreated, whether by bullies like John who hurt them, or by simpering courtiers like Clara, who kept them so drugged that they were no more than toys. I’d hated the idea of being so responsible for a fellow creature’s happiness or misery.

  Beside me, Little Jane tucked Much into the nest of sacking and moss we had made for the owlets. Scarlet’s pin feathers were coming in, but she still wasn’t big enough to fly out at night. I settled her down next to her brother, to rest if not to sleep, and to keep their owly watch over us.

  Little Jane retrieved a small, heavy-looking bag from a shadowy corner of the cave. She poured its contents onto her lap and began sorting through them: nails, long and short, all of them fat and sturdy. “We’ll need them come building-time, and that’s sooner than I thought, with the dry weather we’ve been having,” she said quietly when she caught me watching her. “I thought, you know, that I’ve as much right to the nails in the carpenter’s shed as you have to Loughsley’s kitchen stores, Silvie.”